Opinion | JamesSurowiecki: The American tax system's not designed for a world in which the richest people can keep their money in stocks and let them keep appreciating without ever having to sell. - MSNBCDaily
, which seems like a lot — until you learn their wealth grew by $401 billion during that same period.The ProPublica story describes this as the result of “tax avoidance,” which makes it sound somehow sinister . But the gap between how much really rich people are worth and how much they pay isn’t, for the most part, the result of them using complicated tax loopholes to protect their money.
Decades ago, really rich people were the ones who typically earned a lot of money each year, either from salaries or — if they were what used to be called rentiers — from dividend payments from stocks, interest payments from bonds and rents from the properties they owned.Of course, they would try to shelter their wealth and exploit every loophole they could. But they typically had a lot of income relative to their wealth.
In the U.S. tax system, capital gains don’t count as income — meaning you don’t have to pay taxes on them.
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